Capturing Contemporary Japan

Differentiation and Uncertainty

edited by Satsuki Kawano, Glenda S. Roberts, and Susan Orpett Long

Publication Year: 2014

What are people’s life experiences in present-day Japan? This timely volume addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the “professional” housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots.

Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Preface

This book was conceived in a dark restaurant/bar on one late autumn evening
in New Orleans in 2010, during the 109th American Anthropological Association
(AAA) annual meeting. After a long day of attending panels, seeing
colleagues, and inspecting new books, we needed to enjoy the music for which
the city is known—jazz. The result was not a release from work, however. We...

Introduction: Differentiation and Uncertainty

How have people in Japan lived with the nation’s growing instability and widening
disparity during the 2000s? Japan was only beginning to recover from
the economic recession of the 1990s and the effects of the bankruptcy of Lehman
Brothers in 2008 when it was hit with the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown
at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant of March 2011. The tragedies of...

Part I: Change Over Time

Part I introduces readers to the long-term socioeconomic shift since the 1980s
through the eyes of the Fujiis, a blue-collar family living in Kansai and studied
by Glenda Roberts (chapter 1), and middle-aged and older people studied
by Gordon Mathews (chapter 2). Both scholars reinterviewed those who had
participated in their earlier studies, thus giving a depth to their informants’
accounts...

Chapter 1: Work and Life in Challenging Times: A Kansai Family Across the Generations

Japan has undergone many changes in the past thirty years. It became
affluent
in these years but then faced a huge economic downturn with the
bursting of its property bubble in 1991 and again with the world financial
crisis (known in Japan as the “Lehman Shock”) in 2008. With the increasing
costs of producing goods domestically, many large firms fled offshore...

Chapter 2: Being a Man in a Straitened Japan: The View from Twenty Years Later

In 1989–1990, I intensively interviewed fifty Japanese women and men
(between the ages of twenty and eighty) from all walks of life in Sapporo,
Japan, about their lives and their notions of what made life worth living
(Mathews 1996). From these interviews, I gathered a clear sense of how the
men with whom I spoke derived their feelings of “being a man”; it was not, for...

Part II: Work Conditions and Experiences

In part II contributors address work experiences and conditions during the
2000s. Sawa Kurotani (chapter 3) explores the lives of female full-time workers
of the bubble generation, in their forties and fifties, who have never left their
workplace for marriage or child rearing, as did most of their peers. Despite
the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), introduced in 1986, which...

Chapter 3 Working Women of the Bubble Generation

this chapter is an ethnographic study of professional Japanese women of
the bubble generation (baburu sedai) who entered the full-time workforce in
the 1980s and early ’90s, at the height of Japan’s postwar economic miracle.
During the economic boom, Japan’s strong economy and the Equal Employment
Opportunity Law (EEOL) suddenly opened up professional opportunities...

Chapter 4 “Making an Ant’s Forehead of Difference”: Organic Agriculture as an Alternative Lifestyle in Japan

My first glimpse of Kana was at a discussion of organic agriculture techniques
in Tokyo. In a roomful of male panelists and mostly male audience, she was
the only woman who offered a technical suggestion. Standing against the wall,
her long hair pulled back from her narrow face, she said, “My friends and I are
doing a rice paddy on a hill, and we thought that the water coming from the...

At 8 p.m. in Daily, a konbini (convenience store) in central Tokyo, a young clerk
places a shopping basket at his feet and begins examining the prepared foods
arranged inside the store’s open refrigerated cases (see figure 5.1).1 His task
is to comb the shelves and remove all “loss” (rosu)—food products nearing
expiration. The clerk starts with the packaged rice balls (onigiri)...

Part III: Exploring New Roles and Identities

Part III consists of three chapters that examine formerly uncharted or underexplored
roles and identities. Nakano (chapter 6) analyzes single women and
their perceptions of themselves during and after their marriageable years. In
postwar Japan the life course was highly standardized, but with the growing
number of singles in today’s Japan, how are they scripting their lives? In a society...

Chapter 6: Single Women in Marriage and Employment Markets in Japan

Single women are described in remarkably negative terms in the Japanese
mass media. One such term, for example, “parasite singles” (parasaito shinguru)
refers to adult single women who live with their parents. The term became popular
following the publication of the book The Age of Parasite Singles (Parasaito
shinguru no jidai) (1999) by the well-known sociologist Yamada Masahiro, who...

Chapter 7: The Aging of the Japanese Family: Meanings of Grandchildren in Old Age

One of my favorite feel-good stories after the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in
northeastern Japan was that of the rescue nine days after the quake of eighty-year-old Abe Sumi and her sixteen-year-old grandson Abe Jin. Not only was
their survival seen as a metaphor for the ability of Japan to come through the
disaster and begin to rebuild, but also the story had a happy ending for the Abe...

In 2004, journalist Kawai Kaori shocked Japan by writing Sex Volunteers,
a book that chronicled how people with disabilities were being sexually “serviced”
by the eponymous sex volunteers for lack of romantic/sexual partners.
This sparked a national conversation on the intersectionality of disability and
sexuality—and a flurry of books with scandalous titles such as...

Part IV: Making Social Ties

Although the Japanese media have coined the phrase “a society without ties,”
referring to the waning family and community ties of the 2000s, the two chapters
included in this section explore the ways in which people make connections
and networks. Kawano’s contribution (chapter 9) illustrates attempts by
nonprofit organizations to foster networks among mothers of preschoolers...

Unlike in early postwar Japan (1950s–1960s), mothers of preschoolers in
Tokyo today neither have a sense of belonging in their communities nor can
easily find support for child rearing among their neighbors. Their communities
no longer maintain strong networks of older child bearers who transmit...

Chapter 10: The Divination Arts in Girl Culture

Two young women, both wearing high school uniforms, were browsing in an
accessory shop in the western section of Tokyo. The girl with the short hair
and ready smile was a Sagittarius, and she was looking for something very specific:
“One of my Lucky Goods for this month is a gold-colored hair ornament.
So I’m getting this one,” she told me, holding out the sparkly gold clip with a...

Part V: Persisting Patterns and Continuities

Despite the shifts toward differentiation and an amplified sense of uncertainty
that have been examined in this volume, people’s lives remain embedded in
some persistent patterns of culture and of social interactions. Yet these patterns
are more than cultural remnants; they are incorporated into the experiences
of everyday life and reinterpreted in the new contexts of globalization, recession...

Chapter 11: Education after the “Lost Decade(s)”: Stability or Stagnation?

Stories of change generally attract more attention than narratives of
continuity.
But as Baker Street’s fictional detective once said, sometimes the
remarkable event is what did not happen. Over the last twenty-five years, there
have been significant attempts to change Japanese education, as might have
been expected, given the new challenges that have arisen during that time; yet...

Let me start with a vignette from the mid-1990s, when I was a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student doing dissertation research on Japanese Brazilian
migrants in Japan. My fieldsite was Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. I had
rented a car to drop a friend off at Narita Airport and was returning to Shizuoka,
passing through the mountains around Hakone late on a Saturday night...

Chapter 13: The Story of a Seventy-Three-Year-Old Woman Living Alone: Her Thoughts on Death Rites

“I’ve decided to have my cremated ashes scattered at sea. I have had a
contract
drawn up and deposited the fees,” Mrs. Noda, a seventy-three-year-old
woman living in a city near Tokyo, told me as we enjoyed tea and sweets
one afternoon in February 2003. She felt relieved that everything had been set
up. I asked her, “What did other people say about the scattering?”...

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